liaison

Frank,
Would you be kind enough to explain to me why in French we don't do the liaison: interet a te.

Je n'ai aucun intérêt à vous nuire.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on December 15, 2009 at 9:43pm

Cedrick -- there are a essentially a couple of reasons, but the basic reason is that not "any old" final consonant is eligible to be a liaison consonant:

(1) speakers only generally make liaison in certain cases where there is a particularly close syntactic relationship between the items in question (as a rule of thumb, an item an its complement, though that's subject to some details and interpretation);
(2) there are generally morphological constraints on when a final consonant can be a liaison consonant-- a final -t as a verb ending or on the end of an adjective is readily eligible, but final -t on a noun generally isn't (bar occasional fixed expressions, e.g. pot-au-feu).

[There are a few exceptions to the above, e.g. dont tends to have liaison with a following pronoun, but you might analyse it as being quite "syntactically far" from the pronoun.]

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Permalink Reply by Cedrick on December 16, 2009 at 9:14am

Ok thanks a lot.
I think I get it.
I realise now that you know more about French than I do!
What is the meaning of the expression: Rule of thumb?

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Permalink Reply by Frank on December 16, 2009 at 10:18am

Une règle d'or ou une règle empirique. Ce n'est pas d'une fiabilité absolue, mais c'est une règle simple et pratique qui fonctionne la plupart du temps.